3 Keys to the Cartegraph User Experience

As your team strives to become a high-performance government that’s more effective and efficient for your citizens, our User Experience (UX) crew is behind the scenes ensuring your software experience is nothing short of exceptional. As customers, we recognize that you spend most of your day within Cartegraph managing your work, resources, budgets, and more. It’s the job of my team to make that experience as simple, engaging, and enjoyable as possible.

So, how exactly do we try to achieve this at Cartegraph? Three ways:

1. Listening is key.

"At any given moment, a user may be delighted or frustrated by their experience—and we want to hear it before you forget and move on."

Creating a streamlined user experience in government is challenging, and a great experience doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time, empathy, and the ability to listen and understand you—our customers. That’s why we regularly conduct research with users at every level in government through in-person meetings, virtual focus groups, the Ideas Portal, and in-app feedback.

In-person meetings: A few times a year, the UX team travels across the country to meet face-to-face with Cartegraph customers. We observe their work routines, and see how our product fits into their day—and how it doesn’t. We also get first-hand feedback on their pain points, what they love, and how we can further aid in their quest to become high performing.

Virtual focus groups: When it comes to feedback on new features or updates to long-standing experiences in our products, it’s great to have multiple customers discuss ideas with each other. These groups have provided feedback on design prototypes and their comments have made a direct impact on the Cartegraph workflows you experience today.

Ideas portal: The Cartegraph Ideas Portal is an incredible resource because it gives all users the power to submit ideas for new features and enhancements. New ideas are submitted every day, and by leveraging their votes users can communicate which ideas matter the most to them. The portal is extremely powerful and its suggestions are regularly included in our software releases.

In-app feedback: To once again expand our opportunities for feedback, we’ve added specific points of contact within the system. At any given moment, a user may be delighted or frustrated by their experience—and we want to hear it before you forget and move on. Good or bad, feedback helps us define what the right experience is for our customers.

2. It’s all about time.

Your job is to improve the quality of life of your citizens, and our job is to build products that free you up to create the most impact possible. Your day shouldn’t be filled with data entry and clicks—it should be focused on making things happen. Too many steps, too many clicks and our software starts to get in the way. That’s why we have a laser focus on simplifying our workflows to reduce the number of steps, clicks, and actions a user is required to work through.

We also know it’s about sharing the right data at the right time. The system should learn how you work and give you what you need—when you need it. Our UX team knows this, and has refocused to make sure we show the most valuable data to users when they need it most. For example, predicting your user workflow and providing options you’ll most likely be picking to save time, or presenting real-time data to help you make the smartest decision possible in the moment.

3. Showing a little personality.

Imagine spending all day interacting, talking, and working with someone who has no personality. They’re dry, no fun, and completely uninspiring. Sounds brutal, doesn’t it? Now, imagine that same person is wicked smart, empathetic to your needs, their happiness is contagious, and they’re willing to go the extra mile to help. Much better, right?

At Cartegraph, the UX team is working toward just that—defining our software personality: how we talk, how we help, and how we engage with you on a daily basis. We know you spend hours a day interacting with our applications, so we want to make sure it’s an enjoyable, engaging, and above all else a helpful experience.

Interested in receiving more info on our next in-person meetings and virtual focus groups? Drop me a line at jonkremer@cartegraph.com!